Monica Crowley claimed reports of her plagiarism were 'debunked' — but they weren't

In her first TV interview since backing out of a White House job,
conservative pundit Monica Crowley appeared on Fox News to
dismiss allegations of plagiarism as a "political hit job" and
claim they were "debunked."

In the simplest terms, the stories published in January that
chronicled the plagiarism Crowley committed in portions of her
2012 book, "What The (Bleep) Just Happened," and her 2000
doctoral dissertation at Columbia University were not debunked.

CNN had found more than 50 such examples in her book, which
HarperCollins, its publisher, stopped selling after the report.
The news outlet reported that the book contained no bibliography.

Additionally, Politico had uncovered that Crowley's dissertation
contained more than a dozen sections of text that were lifted from other
sources. Some instances lacked any attribution; Crowley sourced
others in footnotes but did not use quotation marks to identify
which portion of the text was directly lifted.

Crowley had been tapped for a position in the National Security
Council before the instances of plagiarism were revealed by CNN
and Politico.

"Complete BS," Andrew Kaczynski, a CNN editor and the author of
the original CNN report, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. "Monica
Crowley falsely claims our reporting on her (extensive)
plagiarism was debunked. nonsense.

"No one has yet to point out a single inaccuracy in our reporting
or asked for a correction on it," he
continued. "It's Monica Crowley v. reality."

Crowley's allies in the conservative press, however, pushed back
on the plagiarism reports.

The National Review published a story on February 2 headlined
"The Anti-Trump Media's Attack on Monica Crowley." It was written
by Andrew McCarthy, a self-described friend of Crowley's.

McCarthy said the reports were "blown wildly out of proportion,
to the point of smear," citing a Facebook post from Lynn Chu, a
copyright lawyer, who said she "found CNN's splashy 'plagiarism'
accusation to be ill-supported — a heavily exaggerated, political
hit job."

Chu said most of CNN's spottings of plagiarism in Crowley's book
came from seemingly "shared proper names and generic phrases, or
news and anecdotes," which she said she considered to be "fair
use." She said CNN's list "was misleadingly long, possibly a
calculated attempt to condemn her with manufactured, but false,
bulk."

However, a quick overview of a sampling of CNN's examples from
Crowley's book appear to tell a different story:

CNN

CNN

Of Crowley's dissertation, Chu said CNN "omitted her footnote
references."

"CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to
the source," Chu wrote. "Readers were disabled from being allowed
to see or infer that sources were in footnotes. It seemed to
selectively delete footnote references (though some were left in)
— perhaps so that readers would assume no visible reference mark
meant no footnote existed."

McCarthy, in his article about Chu's Facebook post, highlighted
that graph and presented a caveat.

"If this happened, it is shameful," he wrote.

But CNN had
addressed the footnotes in Crowley's dissertation, saying,
however, that she "often failed to include citations or to
properly cite sources in sections where she copied their wording
verbatim or closely paraphrased it."

Additionally, Crowley sometimes initially cited sources but then
failed to do so on subsequent references that appeared to be
taken wholesale from or were extremely close to the original
text.

Here were a few of the instances of plagiarism included in CNN's
report on Crowley's dissertation:

CNN

CNN

CNN

CNN

McCarthy wrote that "from a legal standpoint" the evidence was
not sufficient to support plagiarism, but he conceded that
Crowley had made "missteps" — not exactly a firm debunking of the
charge, as Crowley characterized it on Fox News.

The second outlet that aimed to debunk the plagiarism reports
was FrontPage Magazine. Its attempt in
January to clear the conservative pundit — in an article under
the headline "CNN's Hit Job on Monica Crowley" — contained a
defense of one section of Kaczynski's report:

"Amazingly, some people consider copying from Wikipedia to be
plagiarism. It is an open-source encyclopedia whose entries on
controversial political matters are zealously guarded by social
justice warriors who prefer 'wikilawyering' and using their sheer
numbers to prevail in edit wars. Copying from Wikipedia is often
like writing down graffiti from bathroom stalls in nightclubs. No
one knows if the graffiti is factually accurate or what the
motives were of the vandal."

It's widely acknowledged that it is unacceptable for an author to
copy and paste from Wikipedia entries in their work.

FrontPage also slung personal attacks against Kaczynski and
BuzzFeed, his former employer, which was described in the story
as a "cat video-loving so-called media outlet."

Business Insider reached out to HarperCollins and The Washington
Times, where Crowley was a columnist, to see if any editors
supported her claim that the plagiarism stories had been
"debunked," as she said in the Hannity interview. The outlets did
not immediately respond.

Crowley, McCarthy, and Politico did not immediately respond to
Business Insider's requests for comment.